the subtle grace of gravity
by Daydreamishly
Summary: Rose was small, she was only a girl; she fit into the space her name carved out into normal language and didn't overflow a bit. The Doctor couldn't have been so easily defined. But this Other was not a Time Lord. He was a man, and he had to be someone.


the subtle grace of gravity  
Daydreamishly

Rose is very, very still. There is a cold, wet wind picking up, scattering sand in her face, and a warm, too-smooth hand in her palm.

She takes a moment to reorient the universe around her. Again.

;

She knows, of course, that The Doctor is not really a name, so she doesn't call him that. It was all right, travelling with a Time Lord and knowing only his title; he was something bigger than could be contained in a calling. Rose was small, she was only a girl, she fit into the space her name carved out into normal language, and didn't overflow a bit. The Doctor couldn't have been so easily defined. But this other was not a Time Lord. He was a man, and he had to be _someone_.

But language is strange, and _you_ and _he_ can substitute any number of syllables that might be used to brand a man. "Is he settling in all right?" "You look distracted." "We went shopping—he let me pick out all of the clothes." "Do you know what you want for dinner?" "He doesn't talk much, does he?" "Of course I care about you." "He's just trying to find his own rhythm, is all." "You know I want you here. It's not like that. I just need time." It builds up long, stretches thin, a chord pulled tight. She forgets he needs a name. Or maybe she chooses not to remember.

;

I have one life to live, Rose Tyler, he had said.

She drinks beer, contemplatively, down at the pub with some friends from work. He is not with her. He doesn't cling. She doesn't know what to make of that.

When she goes home, her flat is dark, and cold. The door to the balcony is open, and she curses her insobriety. She hugs the walls around the room, and glances outside, expecting anything. But it is just him, standing, hands in pockets. Jeans, t-shirt. It's February. She curses loudly and berates him, but he only looks at her.

"What are you thinking, in this weather?" She asks him. He looks down his long nose at her and does not reply. She becomes uncomfortable, and guilty, and does not know why. "Come in. Let me make you some tea."

He follows her wordlessly.

;

When he chooses to move out of her apartment, it is a relief. They are all stony silence and forced pleasantries, and she keeps trying to forget he is human, and not succeeding. It is a slow build up that will end in tears, but he tells her he is leaving, and that is anticlimactic. She pretends to try and dissuade him, for the sake of their friendship, but it is a pointless conceit. There are no hard feelings, but Rose wonders if he has any feelings at all. She wonders, not for the first time, if something went wrong in this incarnation; if only having one heart makes him half the man he was. She doesn't dwell on it. It's nothing they can fix.

;

Months pass. She helps him move into his own flat, only a few blocks away from Torchwood headquarters. She is still an operative, active, and he spends most of his time in their archives, researching the extraterrestrial phenomena, looking for clues to god knows what mysteries. They don't speak about it. Rose acknowledges that there had been a window of time, there in the beginning, where she could have established herself as his confidante. Mourning had locked her jaw, had made her dumb and withdrawn, and worst of all, he hadn't chased her. Rose and the Doctor would have waited for each other an eternity. This other had Only One Life to Live.

She realizes one day that it's been over a week since she's dropped in to check on him. She hastily dresses and goes to his flat, and finds him reading with rectangular glasses by a lamp that she hadn't help him pick out. She goes through several feelings at once, and then settles on feeling nothing at all. He welcomes her friendly, but stiff; estranged lovers, or casual acquaintances, one—then again, nothing at all, nothing at all.

After that visit, it is another week until she sees him again, and then another two. Eventually she goes to his, tired, obligated, forcing a cheerful smile, and finds him in the company of a girl she's never met. She remembers to be jealous for a half-moment, and then she can't even convince herself to keep it up. She laughs, says she'll come back tomorrow. She doesn't. The weeks come and go at a completely regular pace.

;

She has no objective, anymore. Her life had been dedicated to being reunited with the Doctor; she had risen early with that aspiration and fallen late into dreams of its success. She had kept in motion, perpetually, and now her finish line was behind her, she didn't know why she was still breathing.

"You could try dating," Jackie suggests, hefting Tony onto her hip to take him to his room for a nap. He is walking now, and says some half-words that might very soon have meaning.

Rose contemplates it, knows there are interested young men enough; thinks that after all, _he_ has moved on. Still, it doesn't seem right. She feels aimless, meandering. There's work, there's the girls from her kickboxing class, there's her little brother. But there was supposed to be more, and the loss of it, without even knowing what _it_ was, permeates the whole.

;

She reads books, and doesn't tell him about them. She beats her own chin-up record, something she never even thought about having back when she was a London shop girl. She reads to Tony from fairy tale books and she doesn't ever, ever wonder what he is doing without her.

;

He comes to her one day, tense shoulders, pursed smile, and they haven't spoken in about a month, more than waiving at each other around work. It hurts a little, to see him, and to know that whatever happened there, she probably fucked it up. She has no idea how she managed. She also knows she'll survive. She pulls a cardigan around her shoulders, feeling underdressed around him in a camisole and the dark rinse jeans she had worn to work today.

"I've got something I wanted to show you," he says, following her into her kitchen. The kitchen had always been their safe-zone, where they discussed tea and Tony and her work and not that he was sleeping in her spare bedroom or that he was a time bomb ticking down to his own death, permanent, just like her.

"Yeah?" She asks, a little surprised. They weren't the type of friends who really shared revelations with another. Really, there weren't exactly friends to begin with.

"Took me two weeks to build it from scratch—didn't have all the same materials, see; had to improvise a bit." Hi produced from a pocket a wand with a glowing end, and Rose felt something new for the first time in months—she felt intrigue.

"A sonic screwdriver?"

"It's a very close replica, anyway. May not have all the same settings; I've not got access to the Time Lord database anymore, so the encryption had to be done manually, and the materials weren't precisely the same… Rose?"

Rose doesn't know what to say. "And you came to show me…?"

He looks hurt a moment, maybe the first sincere emotion she's seen on him since Bad Wolf Bay, but it's gone. "I just thought you'd be interested. I'm sorry, I should have realized how late it is. I can come back tomorrow," he says, and although he says it without accusation, Rose feels like she's been slapped in the face. He begins to walk back towards the door, and Rose says,

"Wait, Doctor-,"

And time goes absolutely still for a moment. He stops in his tracks. She doesn't recognize the button-down periwinkle shirt he's wearing.

She takes a deep breath, and continues, feeling the barrenness in her scrape at her throat, "I don't have anywhere to be tomorrow,"

He remains still, and then straightens like a veteran in a parade, weary, and faces her with a charming smile.

;

There is this very strange construct of reality around them. They pretend that they did not spend months not knowing each other. They pretend they have never lived another life but the one they live now. They pretend he is not a mortal man who had once offered her his finite lifespan. They pretend they don't feel strange with each other.

But there is another reality that comes up to greet them when the conceit wears thin that is genuinely encouraging. The Tardis branch is finally starting to grow. The Doctor—as Rose calls him now, lightly, without too much focus—had neglected it for weeks, not knowing if that was truly the life he wanted to pursue. Rose asks him once, when they are in his kitchen and looking at a sunrise through his window, and everything, all the realities at once, seem waxy and insubstantial, and she can't help herself, what changed his mind.

"I was tired of waiting for something to make sense," he says, shrugging, an apologist for his human emotions. Rose later decides to ignore the idea of him having any sort of uncertainty or ambiguity about his future, but in that moment, she understands him a little better.

;

She begins, stutteringly, like an old truck trying to start, to miss his presence, to crave him, to wonder when they will see each other next. Their weeks become days and days become hours. They nurse the Tardis into being, and its chameleon drive is perfectly intact, but the Doctor programs it into a blue box. It doesn't wheeze _quite_ the same; newer, friendlier, less worldly than its parent, but it is the first time since Rose saw the original disappear that Rose has felt at home.

The interior is cozier, homely, reminds her of libraries and fireplaces, and on her first time inside she remembers with a jolt the night she went to visit him, and he was reading by lamplight. He comes to her side, beaming, wearing a navy suit, and she forgets the thought.

"I haven't got her fine-tuned yet; this is just the default control space. I can make her look just like she did back in the day, though." He is grinning from ear to ear, and she smiles gently.

"That's all right," she says, looking up into his face. "This is nice, too."

He looks down to meet her eyes. "Rose Tyler," he says softly, and then, just when she thinks that they are about to solve it, the whole thing, he dances away to begin pressing buttons and levers on the console. And this, she remembers, too—the sense of incompletion, of suspended animation, of falling, but never hitting the ground.

;

She soaks him up like water in rice. She tries, valiantly, to drown in his never-quite-romance, and it's everything it was before, but worse with the possibility of reciprocation. They exist one day in London, fighting to save the world from invasion, and the next in all manner of other world, and Rose sometimes forgets to believe there has ever been a time in her life that this was absent. It's the same as it ever was, painstakingly, to the point that the Doctor pointedly never revisits an old haunt of theirs, them knowing and not acknowledging together that it may be different, and then they would have to acknowledge that they, too, are different. And this, on some level, makes her sad. She'd like to see _how_ things have changed, or if they haven't, would like to show _him_ something, for once. His eyes are new. And subtly, he is new, too. He avoids this conclusion within himself, instead dragging them to corners of the universe he knows nothing about, so in their ignorance he can cling to universal inexperience.

But the good news about time was that it was more-or-less infinite. They have plenty to explore together, past, present, and future. They build new memories over the course of the first few weeks, trying to erase the pain of their mutual loss. They run from dinosaurs and join a wandering troupe of actors in the sixteenth century and watch the first man teleport and eat pear pancakes on Europa with the Emporer and stop a war between the denizens of Pluto and Charon and never once do they kiss: they laugh and spin and curl their fingers together and all in all just forsake the concept of personal space with each other, but they continue to not consummate the thing that they have spent so much time cultivating between them. And Rose never knows why, she had barely known before in that other universe, but she honestly has less idea now. She begins to notice, eventually, that as soon as she has time to wonder about it too seriously, the Tardis will deposit them somewhere new, magical, and usually dangerous.

;

But it doesn't stop her wanting. She now feels the build-up of every moment of their history, past, present, future. And he is the same as ever; comfortable to play the love-struck adventurer with her, but never to spend the night. She's starting to think about the other girl he had been with that night, and it's starting to eat her alive.

"Are you sad?" Tony asks her, when she forgets for the third time to be reading him Winnie the Pooh.

"Not at all, munchkin," She answers, pulling him close and tickling him. She realizes she's lying, though, and that's a little mortifying. All this time, dreaming of the day she was back with her Doctor, travelling the Universe like they had never been apart. All the time spent avoiding the Doctor, believing he couldn't give her that. And now that she has it, she has the nerve to ask for more?

But there's nothing for it, she knows, when the Doctor leans in and smiles at her and her brother, lovingly, and her stomach flips and she's literally dizzy with how much she wants him.

Back at home, her home, The Doctor allows himself to be crowded against the counter where she had previously set out cups for tea. She presses against him, hand cradling the side of his head, thumb stroking his jaw. They've been dancing around it so long that Rose doesn't even take the time to consider that this is not allowed. It should just be inevitable. All this prolonging the inevitable—it had to be so that they could end up here, in this moment. It _had_ to have been.

She kisses him, for the second time ever, and he sighs into her, wistful, which Rose stores in her thoughts for later analysis.

"Waited for you—so long," she breathes. "Couldn't live without you. God, I just." She cuts herself off by kissing him again, and her hands go to unbutton his jacket, a previously impervious barrier, and feels the thrill of success momentarily before he gently stops her hands with his own. There are so many reasons he could be doing that that did not involve halting their progress as a whole, but dread settles onto her immediately and overwhelmingly. Not again. Not this time.

"Rose. We should. Wait."

She wrenches away from him, aghast. "_Why_."

He reaches for her again, but she backs away from him. "I have waited for you for… _Why._ Why can't we have this? Why, after all this time, is this still not allowed?"

"You don't want this from me," he answers, voice raw, still reaching for her. "You'll take it and it won't be what you wanted. This isn't right for us. Not yet."

"I don't understand!" She's crying now, sobbing, and it's so stupid, that something like this would come between them, when they are _everything_ to each other. Physical intimacy shouldn't compare to what they already have. But somehow, it does.

"You don't want this from me," he repeats, voice escalating in desperation. "You don't even fucking _know _me!"

She freezes. She is so, so still. He is breathing wildly, and then he is collapsing inwards, covering his face with his hands to speak.

"You didn't want anything to do with me," he says, brokenly. "You only wanted _him_. And I tried to make you see that I'm not him, but you just didn't want anything else."

"You _are_ him. You told me that," Rose denies, horror blooming in her stomach.

"I said I have his memories."

"You…You've _been_ him this whole time, though…"

"Because it was the only way to have you back. I needed you back. I tried so hard to live without you, Rose, but every second was unbearable."

Rose thinks about the blonde girl in his flat. She thinks about how she never saw her again.

"I thought, that given time, you would learn to love me. See that I'm better for you. Rose, he- he- he cared about you so much, but you were a moment for him, just a mark in time, and he wanted to spend your life with you, but he moved on from you. I don't want you to spend your life with me, I want to spend _my life _with _you_. I want that for us so badly. But you never even asked my name."

"It's the Doctor." Rose shakes her head. "You're the Doctor."

There was a moment of quiet, and then he gathered himself up. "Doctor isn't a name." And he leaves.

;

She feels like she has lost him again, for the third time. She stays in bed. She dreams of meeting him, the real Doctor, and leaving forever. She thinks about ways to make it happen. She doesn't leave the bed. She knows it's impossible.

;

She gets up. She goes to work at Torchwood. He isn't there. She has no idea where he is. She doesn't try to find him.

;

Weeks pass. She feels like she is standing stationary, and the world is moving around her. Years ago, his hand gripped hers and he told her to run. She's been running ever since. Now, it feels like she's finally stopped.

;

She reads books, and none of them engage her. She beats her own chin-up record, and doesn't even notice. She reads to Tony from fairy tale books and never stops thinking about him, even for a second.

;

She misses the Tardis like she might miss a person. She thinks of its warm, cushioned interior, and how he had promised her he'd change it to what it was before, but how it had just sort of stayed the same. She thinks of how much she had grown to love coming back to it after an adventure in feudal Japan or out in a small solar system in the Magellanic Clouds and collapsing into its plush furnishings like into bed after a long day. She thinks of how he had looked at her in those moments, adoring. She feels like an idiot.

;

It's not blue, but she knows it. She helped grow that Tardis; she knows it like she knows Tony. She's hunted to the ends of the earth for it. She barely knows where she is right now. It doesn't matter. She doesn't have a key. It doesn't matter. It recognizes her and lets her in immediately.

He's standing at the controls, fiddling with dials, and he looks stunned to see her. Rose takes a liking to the expression, which is fairly new to her. He hadn't let her see it much in the past, when he was pretending to be The Doctor.

"What are you doing here?"

She learns that he's rude.

"Pear pancakes," she blurts. He stares at her. She regroups, and when she speaks again, she has a better grasp on the language. She prays he understands. "When we were on Europa, we ate pear pancakes. The Doctor hated pears. I loved him, so much. But he and I wouldn't have had that together."

His face relaxes marginally. He doesn't look like he forgives her, but he isn't about to toss her back out, either.

"You're wrong. I _do_ know you. You're clever—the cleverest human alive, probably. You're very—what's the word?—not really defensive, but. You say things before you completely think about them. When people question you, you need to set them straight. You're a little more bitingly sarcastic than the Doctor, but it makes me laugh so I don't mind. You like exploring, but sometimes you just like being comfortable and exploring a book, and I think that is probably good for both of us. You _are_ angry, and full of vengeance. I don't like that. But I want to help."

He exhales.

She waits, patiently.

"You want to come back."

"No. I want to start over."

He combs his hand through his hair, blowing air through his cheeks, and Rose doesn't say it out loud, but she can't help but think they stay the same.

"Okay. We can start over."

She smiles, and steps closer, offering him her hand.

"Hi. I'm Rose. What's your name?"

He gives her a very small smile in return, takes her hand in his, and then he answers her.

;

Title from "You Are the Moon" by The Hush Sound. Please review.


End file.
